Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

52 W.G.Grace played fourteen minor games in Scotland, most of them in the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, mainly before 1877, then a gap in the meat of his career until a few more after 1890; none of them was what came to be judged first-class. The first international sporting star and the greatest cricketer was never seen in his pomp and against meaningful opposition north of the border. There was a sense in which the county cricket formula was inward-looking. 6 It was not helped in that the club at the pinnacle of this pyramid with its base of local clubs and its medium tier of county clubs was a reluctant leader. Clothed in Georgian entitlement and very much an aristocratic bastion – in the 1880s when MCC’s membership was over 2000, one in seven of these gentlemen were titled – the club was not much moved to act as final arbiter. Like Julius Caesar refusing thrice the imperial crown, MCC were unwilling to assume supreme authority, although MCC’s stance was more genuine and less politically astute than Caesar’s. Possibly the grudging disinclination of Oliver Cromwell to become king would be a more correct choice of historical equivalence. Eventually, as the counties fumed and bristled over one controversy and then another, MCC were persuaded to adopt a supervisory role in regard and laws and regulations. Curiously, it would be 1898 before MCC headed up a Board of Control and the summer of 1899 was the first time MCC had oversight of team selection for all five tests as opposed to just the Lord’s match. Actually, it would be 1907 at Sydney before the first match in the Anglo-Australian canon was one in which both sides represented sovereign states and were selected by acknowledged national agencies – the first true ‘international’ Test, leaving question marks over the status of the previous 76 so-called Test matches. With its principal club loth to take the lead and its mainstream, that is, top-grade county, clubs few in number and inhibited in mind-set, these issues are important because they pose an awkward question. In this lengthy period of burgeoning county and Test cricket, to what extent was the mentality of the cricket authorities geared to the organisation of an evidently popular modern sport in respect of what in effect was, socially speaking, a two-tier audience? Before addressing that poser head on, what can rightly be said about the evolving formula of mainline cricket was that it was providing more employment for the professional player. If the range of prime cricket watching for the masses narrowed, the employment opportunities for some fraction of that host opened. Professional cricketers having been reduced to a beggarly twenty or so during cricket’s decline around the turn of the previous century, MCC alone employed 60 ground bowlers by the end of the 19 th century chiefly for the benefit of its members. Surrey had a ground staff of 32 and Lancashire more than twenty while Warwickshire and Nottinghamshire employed about a dozen each. The remaining first-class counties had fewer professionals; a guesstimate for the total number of paid cricketers Clubs And County Clubs